The Incredible Life of Emily Joon
by Sincerely Marigold
Summary: (Loyal Subject Sequel/Spin-off). Emily Joon Ballard is a well-respected Julliard professor specializing in the works of the mysterious Sylph of the 1770's. Modern scholarship has tied those classical masterpieces to loyalist, Boris Bordon and she believes, like many others, that he was responsible for their creation. She is about to learn how incorrect those theories are.


**I**

 **Intro: The Carnivorous Plant Exodus**

There were better ways to spend a Friday afternoon in the Big Apple. In fact, I could count the alternatives out on all of my fingers and all of my toes and still require more fingers and toes to get the job done. I was stranded, listening to the strange duet being performed by an ornery customer and an electric milk steamer. He was an eccentric type. The customer, that is, all that I knew of the milk steamer was that it was working overtime to please that arrogant fool whose card was still jammed in the chip reader. It started to beep and now we had a trio. I covered my face in embarrassment. Had I not known Arthur Tarleton so well, I would have intervened and saved the poor barista. I would have explained to him and everyone else in the café that a soy latte with _partial foam_ was a myth and that no feelings would be hurt in the grand scheme of things if he ladled off the excess froth with a plastic spoon. It might have surprised him, at least, to know that I was there.

Arthur was meeting me in the cafe and yet, he hadn't even seen me when he walked in. The ink on our divorce papers was still tacking and not yet dry. The tragically smote ruin of our marriage was cooling in a morgue somewhere downtown. I can see the cast of Law and Order right now, poking and prodding it with a stick and trying to estimate its cause of death. This scene that we were playing in right now would be all of the evidence that any detective could ever hope for. We were both taken long before we found one another, long before that first stroll across the quad and the accidental peck that he gave me on the lips instead of the cheek when we parted ways one day in the student union. The science books that he carried in his pretentious leather satchel, the legions of sheet music in the basket of my Schwinn- those were what we truly loved. Our aspirations and eventually, our occupations were destined to demolish all other pretenses of affection.

I fussed over my reflection, a force of habit. Superficially speaking, I hadn't changed since the day that we met. I still limited myself to overall dresses, striped jumpers and canvas shoes. My messy, bleached bob and baby bangs that Art had once deemed in an affectionate slur as "sharp enough to tell time with," still defined me. I orchestrated those distractions, those "too cool for school" gimmicks to conceal who I was at the core. Even after starting my career as a professor at Julliard, I refused to drop the look, the act. Arthur needed nothing of the sort, as much as it pains me to say because it is so damned sexist. But in a society where one can command everything from attention to respect to a latte served with a precise temperature and X-amount of bubbles, merely by being male, I should at the very least have the ability to point out our imbalance of power. Here is the point of this paragraph: I _still_ wanted to look good for him and it makes me sick to admit it.

Two perfectly ideal $5 soymilk lattes were called out as "free" and set to cool at the pickup station. They were Arthur's rejects. There I was, not a foot away, artfully pillared between those two undesired ecofoam cups. I was hunched over my own hot beverage of choice when those steely grey eyes met mine. Arthur donned the perpetual appearance of a brain damaged fox in a chicken coop, even in his most tender moments. The tenderness was not so much for me as it was for the custom order that he clutched in that meaty paw of his. A rude observation, I know, but as an accomplished violinist and cellist, the first thing that I notice when standing face to face with another human being is their hands and Arthur's were dreadful. Perhaps I should have taken that subtlety as my first warning.

"Emaroo!" The bastard imposed a terrible side hug.

"You know I don't like that."

"What? It's a term of endearment," he slunk into his seat, "a cross between an Emily and a kangaroo. You should be honored!"

I pulled my rosehip tea to my lips and drew it in. Arthur followed suit. Drinking would shut him up for a minute or two, at the very least. "We have been gathered here today for… why?" I snapped, tapping loudly on the glass of my wristwatch. "Have you finally decided to return Orby to me? Because you know, by doing so, you would be doing something nice for someone else."

"Orby stays," Arthur raked his hand through his curly, russet locks. In the sunlight, or rather, that reflective version of sunlight that is sourced from the tall, glass buildings that surrounded us, it was a sickeningly beautiful color. "I gave you Billio."

"Yeah. Because you knew that it is possible to have a custody hearing for a dog in this spectacular country of ours," I continued over Arthur's incorrect humming of God Bless America. Leave it to a Brit. "You're using Orby as leverage because you want me to go back to that lab of yours-"

"- lower your voice." He crouched towards the table, as though a physical demonstration could stifle my growing fury. Guess again.

"He is not John Andre. He is an invalid that you picked up at the park and offered to pay him big bucks because that thesis of yours is giving you writer's block. It's a scam, Art. And an idiotic one at that! In a matter of months, you are going to lose your tenure because of the stupidity that you resorted to in a moment of desperation. You'll never learn." I crossed my arms over my chest and looked outside, this was meant to calm me down, but the disorienting chaos of the city had an opposite effect on me. "Are you feeding Orby, at least? You haven't given him any more hamburger meat, have you? You can't do that to a venus flytrap! Have you, at the very least, found my supply of dehydrated bloodworms? If you have a pen, I can write down how to rehydrate them and feed them to a trap properly. You will, of course, have to close _and_ massage the-" I was immediately distracted by what Arthur was retrieving from his satchel. It was a picture that he had taken with his polaroid camera of a severely confused looking gentleman feeding a blueberry muffin crumb to a venus fly trap in a little clay pot. My blood began to boil, but I kept a straight face as best I could. "You brought in a professional to kill Orby and you are blackmailing me with the photographic evidence. Excellent."

"Look closer at the convict, Emily Joon." Arthur winked. "I think you might recognize him."

With a groan, I did what Arthur had asked of me. Looking past the grotesque act that was being performed in the image was challenging at first, but it paid off somewhat. "Stands to reason," I mused, my words came across as collected and indifferent, but there was no denying the resemblance that the man possessed to the single most important person in my life. "You hold my trap ransom and you hold my books ransom. It must have taken you days to find yourself someone who looks exactly like him, just to spite me. But it is not possible to pull someone out of another time and bring them into the present, Art!"

"Perhaps you are right," he grinned slyly, "but it isn't everyday that you come across someone who is as batty about Boris Bordon as you are! Batty enough to impersonate him, assuming your theory is correct. He knows things. He knows about the unfinished opus and where other masterpieces were stored. Even if it is only speculation, just speaking with him about it all will open up old theories that you and other scholars believe to be closed! And you'll be able to save Orby the Venus Fly Trap from the tyranny of incoming blueberry muffin crumbs!"

I sloshed my tea around for a moment or two, "You really shouldn't do that," I mused, "it will mistake the crumb as a fly. Even after rejecting it, the trap will release digestive juices and slowly eat itself instead of-"

"Carnivorous plants are disgusting." If I had a dollar for every time I heard Arthur say this, I would be a very rich woman, indeed.

"Fine. I'll do it. I'll give your impersonator ten minutes and if I don't like what I hear, I will take my trap and get. Capisce?" I caught only a partial nod before eclipsing Arthur's face with my cup and taking a mighty gulp. Never in my life had I swallowed my own excitement and joy so quickly without choking and causing a scene. I had been baited, this was clear. But my thesis had become just as much of a fool's errand as Arthur's. What I needed was a new perspective, a new way of looking at the mysterious Sylph, whose work I had admired since girlhood. There was also a part of me, a tiny spark that was bright enough for only me to sense and be aware of, that yearned to believe that it was true. That Boris Bordon, himself, my muse, the greatest composer to ever live, was across town feeding a muffin to my favorite carnivorous plant.

 **A/N: I really wanted to get the ball rolling on this story. Although it is technically a sequel for "Loyal Subject", which still has roughly ten more chapters to go, it can also be read alone. I wanted to do something kind of light/Kate & Leopold-inspired and this seemed like a good plug for it. Although this is technically mapped out to be a short story, it can always become a larger work. We shall see. As always, thank you for reading! More to come! X **


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